Yes, it's true. AP reports"After watching TV images of gay weddings in San Francisco, Cambodia's King Norodom Sihanouk said Friday that homosexual couples should be allowed to get married." And this is confirmed by the King's website, which posts his handwritten notes in French, complete with editorial marks. My French skills are vestigial: I am 98% sure that the note does start the way AP says it does, but I'd be grateful if someone who actually reads the language with some facility would either post here or forward to me a translation of the whole note, which seems to go into some detail about the justification for legalizing gay marriage and general sexual identity tolerance in a liberal democracy.

As the AP points out, he's a constitutional monarch with no actual authority, but apparently no restraint, either.

The handwritten notes, most of which appear to be formal greetings and traditional monarchical proclamations of pride and attention, had a charm, a warmth, that surprised me. I think I've gotten too used to computer texts, particularly the blog form, which is starting to run together. Sure, people use different backgrounds, they have different blogrolls, but fundamentally the blog is a very limited form. If you could combine the handwritten image with an embedded searchable text, the blog could be a truly personal creation, but still take advantage of the searchable-linkable technology of the web. I suppose I'm thinking of the amazing variety of book-design work being done by artists (which the National Museum of Women in the Arts showcases regularly) as a model for a more powerful union of author, text and aesthetic. Of course, my handwriting isn't anything anyone would want to read a lot of, but it's pretty distinctively my own. Perhaps if I were king of something.....

And I ran across a quotation today, which I'm surprised I've never run across before. I'm a collector of quotations about history (not quite as focused as the Szasz collection; I include more general interest quotations) which I sprinkle on my class handouts, sometimes as counterpoint, but mostly just because. Anyway, I'm surprised that I'd never run across "Omnia mutantur; nihil interit." [All things are changed; nothing dies] -- Ovid (Metamorphoses 15,165), though in the source I read it was translated as"Everything changes, but nothing is truly lost." It captures the essence of the flaw in the anti-gay-marriage arguments. More about that later.